Cities: Skylines 2 "absolutely cannot" have the decade of DLC features that the original game added | GamesRadar+

"We absolutely cannot have ten years of Cities Skylines 1 content done" for the launch of the sequel, Colossal Order CEO Mariina Hallikainen says in the latest issue of PC Gamer. As a result, the studio decided to focus on "those things that we feel should have been in the original Cities: Skylines, but we didn't have the time or manpower."

Anyone that's not a fucking idiot already knew this, because we understand how temporal reality works. But the whiny "everything sucks and is bad" Stephanie Sterling crowd won't care.

This is a trend that I have recently started noticing. PAYDAY 3 came out with basically nothing included after PAYDAY 2 had literally 10 years of continuous content/80 DLCs pumped into it. As another example, The Sims always comes out with a new release that has every feature removed so they can sell you all the same DLC again and again.

In some cases this would appear to be a (corporate) success, but it seems it's actually been part of the downfall of recently-released PAYDAY 3. As of this moment in time, the rolling 24-hour peak of player count in PAYDAY 3 is 4,699. The rolling 24-hour peak of PAYDAY 2 is 37,399. Why would players who have a fully finished game with all DLC already available want to play your new barren game?

As much as I like C:S, the thought of getting a relatively barebones game with $200 in DLC over the next 5-7 years to make the city feel complete makes me feel depressed.

That was the bummer in the original game. Only two ways to deal with trash, unless you bought $30 of DLC. I'll be waiting to see if the game is good or not, or if they totally gimped certain parts of the game like bridges, ports and transit to resell back as a la carte DLC.

And then you've got absolute mad men like Concerned Ape making stardew valley 10 times better with free updates for years and years. Showing these money hungry companies how it's done.

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If the rumors regarding the performance for the sequel are true, they won't even have a working game on launch.

This is the classic problem with all paradox games that I don't really have a solution for. Like as players we want them to support the game for a long time and keep updating it, but unless that's through dlcs then they can't really do that without getting paid somehow. The other alternatives are just not doing any updates and releasing a full new game every couple years which would probably have less features added compared to doing dlcs. Or having a subscription that you pay to get new updates which while I'm personally fine with I know a lot of people aren't. So that just leaves the current strategy of constantly doing dlcs and every once in a while releasing a new game and bringing over as many dlc features as they can to the new one while not making the development time unreasonable.

I haven't played Cities: Skylines in years, this looks great but hopefully they fixed the stupid traffic AI. I hated that when you built a wider road to decrease congestion half of the cars would ignore the opened lanes and still pile up in the original ones.

Why not? The constant updates are what kept me playing for so many years!

From what I've seen the road building is far better and basically incorporates all the "retired" mods

I'm sad that zoning is still essentially the same as how SimCity did it in 1989, as I really want mixed use, but that's a minor quibble

I'm planning to try and build an offset hex grid city

Basically there's one hex pattern for car traffic, and an offset hex pattern that's for pedestrians and cyclists, and where there's any intersections between the two, the car traffic gets raised to give pedestrian traffic an underpass.

Also every car intersection is a roundabout, and I'm considering doing alternating one way lanes with every pair being bracketed by transit only lanes.

My take is that they're trying to sell the game to people who haven't already purchased CS:1, or who haven't purchased any DLCs from CS:1. If you've already purchased DLC's, you've already served your purpose to the company.

Or playable framerates.

That's totally expected. Besides, most of the Cities Skylines DLC were shit anyway. I mean building a zoo, seriously?

I like Paradox DLC policies. Most of them are actually good and add a lot to the game. It also lets them service the game for a long period of time and push free updates along with DLCs.